
The Return of Our Boys 

Jl ^ale of Qreat T)a^s 



J. EDGAR PARK 




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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



The Return of Our Boys 

Jl Vale of Great T>ays 



J. EDGAR PARK 



Copyright 1919 
J. Edgar Park 



Ernest F. Dow, Publisher, Wesl Newton, Massachusetts 



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V 



By the same author 

The Keen Joy of Living 

The Sermon on the Mount 

The Wonder of His Gracious Words 

The Man Who Missed Christmas 

The Dwarf's Spell 

Parables of Life 

How I Spent My Million 

The Rejuvenation of Father Christmas 

The Disadvantages of Being Good 

The Children's Bread 

The Bad Results of Good Habits 

The Return of Our Boys 



DEC 10 1919 

©CI.A559003 

"to 



THE RETURN OF OUR BOYS 



It had been a wet and cheerless 
summer. True to its name, it had 
rained nineteen days out of every 
nineteen. The war was over. Most 
of our soldiers had returned from 
Europe except those of whom we 
sadly said: 'They never will return!" 

Those who had come back to us 
had most of them returned stronger 
and bigger in every way. In char- 
acter and poise ten years older, we 
said, than when they went away. 
They had left us boys. They had 
been given back to us men. 

They talked little of what they had 
seen. They said nothing of what they 



4 THE RETURN 

had done. Back into our life they 
came, glad to forget, travelled with 
us and worked with us again. 

But often between the conventional 
lines of their lives, in stray glances and 
odd turns of phrase we seemed to read 
strange tales of flame and terror and 
heroic drudgery amid the mud and 
in the lonely skies of France. 

But to our eternal boys across the 
seas our hearts strayed often back, 
boys who would never come as men 
again to cheer us. 

At last late in the fall suddenly 
there was a perfect day. It had been 
a still night full of stars and they 
faded on a morning clear and bright 
compelling us to rise betimes and 
greet the sun. 



OF OUR BOYS 5 

The family, surprised to find itself 
downstairs together, looked at each 
other with a kind of early morning 
gladness, saying: "What a morning! 
What a wonderful morning after the 
rain!" Breakfast was not ready and 
one suggested: "Let us go outdoors! 
It is like a spring day outside!" 

So the whole family found them- 
selves upon the doorstep in the open 
air. How great was their surprise as 
they looked up and down the street 
to see the freshness of the morning 
light casting a kind of halo around 
just such a family group at every 
door. Then they called neighborly 
greetings over to each other, feeling 
friendlier than they had for years. 

We were about to go in again, when 



6 THE RETURN 

the little mother holding up her hand, 
called us to "Listen." Then there 
was silence among us for we too 
heard something that made our hearts 
stop beating for an instant. Long we 
stood listening. All heard that sound, 
but no two heard alike. 

To one it was the march of feet 
returning, the breaking of ranks, and 
then singled out from among the rest 
the unmistakably familiar tread of a 
boy coming towards us. 

To another it was the whirr of 
wings in the sky, the stopping of an 
engine, the gliding down of a plane 
and then a sudden rush as to out- 
stretched arms. 

To yet another it was the notes of a 
bugle coming nearer and nearer, end- 



OF OUR BOYS 7 

ing suddenly beside us as though 
choked off in merry laughter at the 
sight of us and home. 

Some heard nothing but felt a hand 
in their hand. Some knew lips touched 
theirs. 

But one thing we all knew as we 
turned together with him into the 
house again: 'The Boys had returned!" 

Before our morning meal was over 
we knew that they still were boys. 
The disillusionments, the intricacies, 
the petty delays and disappointments 
which succeed every war and tarnish 
for a time the victory were not shared 
by them. They had come back in the 
full flush of heroic idealism as they had 
gone forth. 

Then began for our town the days 



8 THE RETURN 

of the golden age again, when we felt 
invisible feet trod our streets and 
unseen eyes of youth were upon us, 
expecting great things of us. 

It was in laughter first that their 
continued presence became known to 
us. Where they were, gloom could 
not abide. In their homes you felt a 
boy's presence again as you entered 
the door. 

There is always a touch of incon- 
sequent fun about a home where 
there is a boy. It never can have the 
deadly, tidy, unused, adult look about 
it of a boyless home. And the parents 
of boys have eyes that are not dully 
sure of just what is going to happen 
next. Their eyes so often love while 
their mouths must scold that their 



OF OUR BOYS 9 

faces have that almost human look so 
rare in parents. The mother, when 
she has schooled herself to take the 
risks of letting her baby boy grow into 
a man, is apt to be even more of a 
boy than the father. For the father's 
stiff and dignified self respect so often 
thinks it cannot afford to recognize or 
remember the funny little fellow he 
used to be. But to a woman, boys 
have always been terrible, forgivable, 
admirable. 

So when you entered one of these 
homes, you felt again the presence of 
the boy. These, you said to yourself, 
are boy's parents, the boy spirit is 
abroad in their home, they are the 
friends of all boys. They love him 
now for himself alone. Not now for 



10 THE RETURN 

their pride in him before their boyless 
neighbors, nor for his future value as 
a helper in his father's trade, nor for 
the sense of ownership and comfort 
his presence used to give them in the 
house, not for what he was to them 
but for what he is in himself, they 
love him now, the spirit of their home. 
In America one breathes in the very 
air a subtle intellectual essence un- 
known in other lands. Men's minds 
respond to simpler truth, men's souls 
thrill far more brotherly together, we 
respect each other more, we bow to 
accidental status less. And when the 
stranger seeks to know this mystery's 
meaning, we reply: "Once we had 
Lincoln!" Nay, our answer rather is: 
"We have Lincoln! He flows in our 



OF OUR BOYS 11 

blood here. His is the evanescent 
face patterned beneath all the surface 
figures of our life!" 

So began to rule in these homes too 
the sunny spirit of their sons who died 
and live forever. 

And on our streets too men walking 
hand in hand with unseen figures 
could not fail to stop and greet each 
other, when their boys were friends. 
These unseen hands refused to let 
them pass. The boys desired to talk, 
so the men stopped too, and barriers 
of race and means and social power or 
need were gone. Their boys were 
living over common dangers under- 
gone and days and nights of comrade- 
ship. So the boys leapt over all the 
narrow fences of religion, society and 



12 THE RETURN 

race and with them dragged us too. 
And with our unseen guests our town 
became more neighborly than ever 
had been known before. 

They did not seem to think that 
they had fought for an abstract prin- 
ciple. They seemed to think the war 
was waged to make our lives more 
worth while. They were so concrete 
about it. Every morning they seemed 
to say: "Now make this day worth all 
that it has cost!" No one of them 
talked of himself, but they talked to 
us of their friends. "Think what this 
one and that went through," they 
would remind us, "just to give you 
the chance to go out as you will and 
walk down the street safely to your 
business this morning!" 



OF OUR BOYS 13 

After a night of terrible storm on the 
sea-coast of Scotland, the wives of 
the fishermen at a little village were 
out at daybreak to scan the horizon 
for their husbands' boats. It had 
been a night of terror, and in the 
gray morning it was a long, long wait 
before one by one, as by miracle the 
boats began to limp into harbor torn 
and shattered, bearing their catch of 
haddock. Hardly had they come into 
port, before a travelling fish-merchant 
was at the quay calling to the fish- 
wives: "What price haddies the day?" 
With indignation in her eyes one wife 
answered him back: "Haddies is men's 
lives the day!" 

So each one of us began to think: 
"This day has been bought for us by 



14 THE RETURN 

blood !' ' ' 'This day is precious as mens' 
lives!" We began to think more nobly 
of life. We took time for courtesy. 
We ceased the idle pursuit of enjoy- 
ment and strove to increase the general 
capacity for joy. We seemed some- 
how to be becoming more like the 
"home" they had dreamed about so 
often in the trenches. 

People selfishly absorbed in making 
a living looked up to find their hands 
in their neighbors hands, and to- 
gether we began to try and make a 
life. Even the gluttons found their 
faces turned mysteriously from their 
own plates to see how little others had 
got. And the very humorists could 
not think of the point of their jokes 
before they had thought of the other 



OF OUR BOYS 15 

fellow's feelings first. Mysterious 
forces seemed to block our selfishness 
on every hand. 

We had our sceptics of course. A 
few solemn wiseacres who had never 
really been alive themselves, and so 
were experts upon death, went around 
declaring that this idea about the 
boys having returned was all sentiment 
and gush. One November day some 
of them stood arguing at a street 
corner, declaring that the idea of 
unseen power and life was ridiculous. 
Just then a sudden gust of wind blew 
their hats off and they ran the whole 
length of the street after them fol- 
lowed by a windy sound of boyish 
laughter. Did it happen accidentally? 
Who knows? The wind bloweth where 



16 THE RETURN 

it listeth, and the laughter may have 
been but the sound thereof. 

That awful tune, "The Dead March 
in Saul" met with strange fate that 
year, for there were gatherings of 
people who felt that low spirits were 
a sign of piety and liked it. The 
organist had hardly started the ac- 
cursed thing once when a fire alarm 
was sounded, and the rest of its pound- 
ings were drowned in fire bells and 
the dashing past of engines and lad- 
ders. Once when some sad soul began 
talking at a meeting of "the manhood 
lost to the life of the nation" a nearby 
rooster began to crow and kept it up 
most unnaturally all through his re- 
marks, only stopping when the next 
speaker began: — "These boys are not 



OF OUR BOYS 17 

lost to the life of the nation. They 
are still living: still loving: still ours. 
They are the leading spirits of the 
nation today." That second speaker 
seemed inspired. A great stillness 
reigned among us as he spoke. His 
voice broke with eagerness at the end 
into a kind of high falsetto. It seemed 
as if Roosevelt was getting his mes- 
sage over through him. The wine of 
young life was flowing in our veins 
those days. A new gaiety was ours. 
Beside us was a great company of glad 
victorious souls expressing themselves 
through us, correcting our gloom by 
their joy. 

To one mother who sat alone sor- 
rowing came that evening the girl 
whom he had loved. These two 



18 THE RETURN 

women had often sat for hours in sad 
memory together. But today, as she 
looked at the mother sitting there 
alone reading, the girl's face was radi- 
ant. "He has returned!" were the 
words she said. "This morning sud- 
denly I knew!" 

Then sitting down beside the mother 
she said: "Here is a letter he wrote me 
long ago from the trenches which I 
never understood. This last page I 
hated. I could not even read it again. 
But this morning he seemed to be 
making me read it with him. Then 
I understood: — 

"And if I should miss you here, how 
terrible! But if I should, remember this: 
Be still the girl I fell in love with, beautiful 
and joyful. I want you to promise to be 
happy, to love. I will be no dead dog in the 



OF OUR BOYS 19 

manger for some other lucky man. Be no 
nun for me! I'll get even with him yet. 
This world is only the primary class in love. 
The real thing lies beyond. In some other 
world we shall meet as strangers, you and I. 
We shall have all the shy delighted thrills of 
getting acquainted, far better than before. 
I shall walk again hours before your door 
getting up my courage to propose. And 
when at last I see love again in your dear 
eyes — then we shall remember that I claimed 
and missed you once before! But then I 
shall not miss you! For my faith is that 
in the next life we lose our status. We are 
there just what we are, with none of the 
accidents of this life to confuse. No one 
will recognize anyone there by anything 
except by love. And love there is going to 
beat love here a thousand to nothing!" 

Now one of that boy's innumerable 
little ways had been his constant 
joking with his mother about her 
addiction to the Saturday Night Tran- 
script. When she used to sit reading 
it, scattering the various sections on 



20 THE RETURN 

the floor around her as she read, he 
used to come in and look at her with 
mock solemn eyes, saying: — "Ah, 
mother, at it again! It's worse than 
the drink!" 

So when these two had read his 
letter, the girl looked at the floor and 
there they were around the mother's 
chair, all the sections scattered on the 
floor. "Worse than the drink!" she 
said, and they both laughed, and in 
that laugh his mother knew. 

So when Christmas drew near we 
all became young again. People who 
had been talking and thinking about 
their souls or their bodies or their 
clothes, people who had been cheer- 
fully predicting that because neither 
God nor man would take their advice 



OF OUR BOYS 21 

therefore the world was going to the 
dogs, — all folks suddenly became young 
again. Our boys' gift to us was their 
youth. They meant to enjoy it in us. 
Fathers and mothers, instead of worry- 
ing about the rising cost of shoes, 
said after the children had gone to 
bed: "Let the future look after itself. 
We'll give them a real good Christmas 
this year!" Even High School boys 
and girls dropped the universe from 
their shoulders and became young and 
sincerely happy again. It was not 
the heartless and frivolous imitation 
gaiety you can buy. It was joy won 
by victory. Their faith and courage 
and idealism, they were giving to us 
for our Christmas present. It was 
ours to win by victory over circum- 



22 THE RETURN 

stances and self. But their strength 
was added to ours in the winning of it. 
They side-tracked our minds from the 
old septic matter that made us old 
and morbid, they stood in our light 
as we tried to gaze at our own be- 
loved selves in the mirror of our am- 
bition, and robbed us of our favorite 
worries. 

The dance, the battle had broken, 
began again. "You will never be 
happy here if you are not happy 
there," they declared, "true joy in 
this world flows into the joy of heaven 
as a river flows into the sea!" 

So it came about that every gift 
that Christmas was planned by them. 
They gave themselves to us. Through 
us they gave to all. Our happiness 
was theirs. 



OF OUR BOYS 23 

One extraordinary feature of that 
Christmas season was the number of 
gifts which got criss-crossed in their 
delivery. 

The set of furs which the laborer 
meant to give to his wife got somehow 
to the poor teacher's wife instead. 
To the spoiled daughter of the union 
they would have meant simply more 
pride and ostentation as she sat in 
her Universal Car. To the slave of 
the School Committee's wife they 
meant her only warm possession as 
she stood on the chill corner waiting 
to cross when the Fords had passed. 

The washerwoman whom the 
wealthy husband discovered the day 
before Christmas and bribed to go to 
help his wife's three maids to do the 



24 THE RETURN 

family-of-two wash for the week was 
somehow found scrubbing for the maid- 
less mother of five. 

Everyone noticed how much more 
attractive, — almost pretty, — the plain 
Miss Bones looked on Christmas Day. 
The reason was that the big sheaf of 
American Beauties and the small trunk 
of chocolates which Don Maurice of the 
college center back meant to send to 
Dolly More "from a fellow who ad- 
mires you, you know who!" had come 
somehow to Miss Bones and made her 
more beautiful. 

Several of the innumerable, tender 
proud remembrances sent by friends 
to the mother of the famous son who 
died gloriously in action came with a 
welcome surprise and a joy no words 



OF OUR BOYS 2*5 

can tell to the forlorn mother whose 
boy died of influenza in the hospital at 
home. 

Pretty little children set out Christ- 
mas Eve to leave gifts for popular 
children friends and returned confes- 
sing having given them to most sur- 
prised and delighted middle-aged lonely 
folk who could not get over the 
shock of happiness for weeks. 

Yes, there were funny tricks played 
that Christmas. Things would not 
run in the conventional line. And 
when donors were faced with these 
apparent misdeliveries they only smiled 
and said that there was no one to 
blame but themselves. Everyone acted 
as if guided by invisible friends. They 
started to do the easy natural ordinary 



26 THE RETURN 

thing and found themselves doing the 
extraordinary friendlier thing. 

The gay heroism of boys who in the 
midst of death had seen the souls of 
their fellows and loved them was 
abroad among us. We seemed worthier 
of them then. 

It had been their great desire to 
live again in the America for which 
they died. But they gave their lives 
not for the imperfect America of men's 
hands, but for the glorious America of 
men's dreams, 

"Whose alabaster cities gleam 
Undimmed by human tears." 

Their desire has been granted. They 
have returned to live again, not in 
this sadly imperfect land. Their home 



OF OUR BOYS 27 

forever is in the America we love, that 
is in our hearts. Their eternal youth 
will goad us on forever until we build 
on these shores the land for which 
they died — America the Beautiful. 



Ill 



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